I’ve been reading more lately. I read Cory Doctorow’s book Content (my review) and think it should be required reading for librarians or anyone else in the various digital content industries. If you’d like a copy, you can read it for free online, or if you’re a librarian or a teacher, you can request a donated copy from the website. I already gave mine away.

FCC broadband billpassed. This might help Farmer Bob [my generic term for the people over on this side of the digital divide] get broadband.

Pew Report “When Technology Fails” (and even really great technology sometimes does). The results will likely not surprise the librarians. “15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices” and “48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.”

7 Responses to "little pieces of things that might interest you"

Thanks for the link to that ‘When Technology Fails’ report – it’s an interesting read. You’d think with all those issues the tech companies would want to provide better support for their customers but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

By Jon Gorman 20Nov08 - 2:50

I always got the feeling that the prejudice is the other way around for Evergreen. That it works for large and complicated system but doesn’t “scale down” to small libraries. Not that I believe it, but that seems to be what I overhear.

Jessamyn I tend to agree with Jon — that people assume it can’t scale down (even though there are some very small libraries using EG). After all, it runs PINES, and that’s a 275-library network. But still, happy to see EG get some Jessamyn-Juice. :)

Nice wrapup… I’ll add Cory Doctorow’s book (funny how we always call him Cory Doctorow, not Cory and not Doctorow) to my reading queue. I chewed through a lot of books recently and it was refreshing to get Back to Print.

Fixed the broken link! Yeah I think of EG as being really flexible personally but I think some people who don’t know the whole Georgia backstory [for some reason people up here don't seem to as often] think of it as being more small-scale? I have no idea why.

They way we have Evergreen set up, it appears to each library’s patrons that they have just a catalog for their library. We’re just sharing bib records, server space, etc. because Michigan already has the Michigan eLibrary, which is used for statewide ILL. Our smallest library has a service population of approx. 100, while the largest, nearly 200,000. It seems to scale really well in both directions!

By Jon Gorman 21Nov08 - 1:54

Out of curiosity, are those folks discussing any other systems like Koha? I’m curious now what conceptions folks have about them. I’m a bit surprised that there’s folks who have heard of Evergreen but don’t know much about PINES….makes me wonder how they are hearing about this and what they think about the other systems…